84 TEIE ANATOMY OF SCIENCE 



Perhaps this is mere vulgar pragmatism. But it is the attitude that has 

 made scientific thought so rapidly progressive while human thought 

 in other domains has been hobbled by inability to reject ideas tliat, 

 however refined and attractive, too plainly don't work. 



The Body Scientific 



In the fable, the blind men's accounts amply suggest that the unseen 

 "elephant" has difiPerentiated parts. Just so, the extreme variability 

 of modern accounts of the invisible abstraction "science" should pre- 

 pare us to find complexity in what we ordinarily regard as an integral 

 enterprise. The artisan, the statesman, and the proverbial man in the 

 street almost invariably define science as something pertaining to 

 technology. The theologian, the philosopher, and any other non- 

 scientific scholar are most likely to define science in terms of cos- 

 mology: world-pictures of the mechanical universe, the evolving 

 universe, the statistical universe, and so on. Asking scientists for the 

 meaning of "science" we find that most do at least agree on what 

 science is not. Almost all scientists draw a sharp distinction between 

 science properly-so-called ("pure science") and the applications of 

 science in technology; most will also distinguish science properly-so- 

 called from the world-pictures of cosmology. Thus, for example, 

 Weizsacker urges on us the need 



to distinguish between two meanings of classical physics: as a world 

 view and as a methodological instrument. 



Scientists ai*e members of human society, and science is conducted 

 within a general cultural atmosphere. Not science, but only a wholly 

 fictional abstraction, lives in a social vacuum. How then is one to 

 treat of "real" science without embarking on a general sociology? 

 We can hope adequately to treat science as a separate entity if only 

 we can first grasp the nature and effects of its various linkages with 

 its social milieu. These interactions, all proceeding through the me- 

 diating enterprises of cosmology and technology, I examine in Chap- 

 ter IV. 



Undertaking an anatomization of "science," I begin by distinguish- 

 ing it from two other enterprises intimately enough allied to be 

 confused with it, and it with them. The more detailed structure re- 

 vealed, as the anatomization is now pressed forward, will be found 



